European Solidarity Corps project "Volunteering at Youth Center of Epirus"

European Solidarity Corps voluntarism project was 15 months long and hosted in total 14 volunteers from Spain, France, Martinique, Denmark, Germany and Portugal. This was a special project because the energy and motivation of these volunteers helped our organization and our beneficiaries to cope with Covid-19 situation. 

Within the project, long term and short term volunteers worked on daily basis in several fields. While the Covid-19 restrictions allowed, volunteers were working with asylum seeker children in ages 5-12 by providing daily non-formal education activities. These activities included arts and crafts workshops, hygiene workshops, sports, group games, table games, English language support, and basic psycho-social monitoring. The activities within the Child Friendly Space allowed children to learn while having fun, socialize, play and the children were in a safe environment. The Child Friendly Space was supported by the humanitarian organization Intersos who were also in charge of the Agia Eleni facility where the activities took place. Read more about their work at Agia Eleni HERE. 

In autumn of 2020, our organization YC Epirus opened a facility for unaccompanied asylum seeker minors Agios Athanasios, in Zagori. Volunteers of this project were there to support, plan and implement non-formal education activities for the 12-17 year old teenagers. The activities ranged from arts, crafts, discussions, interactive group games, workshops and presentations to football, yoga, hiking and other sportive activities. These activities supported the unaccompanied youth in their non-formal education progress in topics such as culture and intercultural learning, geography, English language, cooperation and communication, emotional intelligence, gardening, creativity and artistic skills, storytelling and self expression, sports, healthy lifestyle, cooking, critical thinking and many more. Moreover, these activities often provided support and active engagement opportunities for the youth who spent their Covid lockdowns living in an accommodation facility without their families and friends and oftentimes without other social and educational opportunities. You can read more about the facility HERE.

Meanwhile, volunteers worked on online content creation on various cultural topics and social issues. Content such as articles, photo galleries and videos were created and shared with the public online. Some examples of these works include an article and gallery about Jewish community of Ioannina, a video interview of a refugee mother, socially engaging literature video series, traditional Epirus food recipe videos, article about asylum seeker conflicts in Greece, comedy videos about freedom of speech and racism and photo contest among others. You can find these contents on our pages τΗΧΟΣ - Wall of Voices and  Ἀπειρωτᾶν - Stories of Epirus People.

You can read more about personal experiences of the volunteers HERE. The project was co-funded by the ESC program of the European Commission and it was approved and supported by the Greek National Agency - Youth and Lifelong Learning Foundation (I.NE.DI.VI.M.).